Friday, April 6, 2012

I was drifting off one evening while watching a movie on the couch as G.C. absentmindedly ran his fingers through my hair. Somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, though, I became aware that his gentle strokes had turned into a movement more like aggressive foraging. I roused myself and as nicely as I could, asked him what the hell he was doing.

"You have a lot of gray hairs, girlfriend," he said, swiftly and without emotion, using his nickname for me. He continued to explore. I pressed pause on the movie and racked my memory. With a small start, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I dyed my hair. My secret was out.

I also no longer remember the discovery of my very first gray hair, but I do remember when I realized I had jumped from the just-for-fun dyeing I did throughout high school and college (miss you, Sunset Blaze) to need-to-do-this-for-real coloring. It was during my first and only trip to the Hamptons. Standing in front of the mirror getting ready to go out, I noticed a run of tiny silver roots down the entire center of my head.

Horrified, I started to pluck. Twelve to 15 hairs later, I realized I’d be half-bald if I kept going. As calmly as I could, I asked my friend Kate to confirm if it was as bad as I feared. To her everlasting credit, she simply replied, "Oh ... yes," dipped into her makeup bag, and proceeded to apply mascara down my entire part.

About a year after that, I met G.C. Though I didn’t love discovering that I was going gray in my mid-20s, I wasn’t necessarily trying to hide it, either. However, I had apparently managed to for almost two years. Oops!

I turned. “Yes, boyfriend,” I said, chin high. “I DO have a lot of gray hairs. I dye them. I guess I never told you that?” I phrased it as a question even though I already knew the answer.

“No, you didn’t,” he said and he contemplated it for a moment. Then, he pushed my head down a little and brought his eyes close, like a scientist peering into a microscope. “Did you ever think of growing them out?” he finally asked.

I started to reply, “No, I don’t think I’m there yet, I’m only 28 years...” but he barrelled on. “You should. You would look just like Storm from X-Men.”

I stopped for a second, trying to remember the Storm character. The image slid into place. “I don’t think if I grew my gray hairs out that I’d look like Halle Berry. But that’s sweet of you.”

“No you wouldn’t look like her at all in the face or body,” he said in a tone that conveyed ‘world’s most obvious thing.’ “Just your head would.”

I couldn’t necessarily argue, but I wasn’t sure how to respond either. He remained undeterred as his eyes and fingers stayed trained on my scalp. “You know who you could also look like? Helen Mirren.”

Again, I was somewhat confused. “Helen Mirren?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “She’s super sexy. You’d look like her.”

“But not really,” I countered. “Helen Mirren has that whole ‘sexy older woman who can teach you things you never knew’ thing going on. I don’t think I can do that using only gray hairs. I’m missing the other half of the equation.”

“We could work around that,” he replied.

“How?”

“I just think we can.”

“This would be a turn-on for you? For me to look like Helen Mirren?”

“Of course it would!”

I really had no reply. While the good girlfriend in me wanted to oblige his request, I didn’t think this particular inclination was mutually beneficial.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I think I’m too young to have my gray hairs totally grown out just yet.” I gave him a small shrug.

He fixed me with a stare and a small frown. “Think about it,” he said, and took the remote from my hands to start the movie again.

Lia LoBello works in public relations and marketing by day, but spends her nights crafting, cooking, and watching real-crime television. She blogs about her projects and recipes at YayDIY. She lives in Astoria, Queens, with her boyfriend G.C. and her dog, Pelusa.

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oooh, interesting. i've got this discussion going on in my relationship right now. my hair has gone from nice auburn to dull brown with blonde-greys pretty consistently. my beau thinks it would be awesome if i stopped dying my hair, but i'm clinging on to it. i don't want to feel like i'm letting his opinion change how i choose to look (based on some bad behaviors in past relationships that i don't want to repeat) but it's kind of nice to think about "letting myself go" like that because he thinks it would be hot. hm.

DO IT. EVERYBODY DO IT. THINK OF EMMYLOU HARRIS AND DOOOOOOOOO IIIIIIIIIIT.

Or don't. Whatever floats your boat. Personally, though, I quit hair dye at 26, I've got a few grays now at just about 30 (and they are the coooooooolest thing that ever happened to me), and I have a goal of going full-on Emmylou Harris.

@werewolfbarmitzvah YES! Every time someone complains about gray hairs, I bring up Emmylou Harris! I want her hair so much. God, gray is so sexy. I might even grow my hair out (it's <1/2 inch right now and I love it) when I go gray.

I also happen to get really excited about my crow's feet (I'm 26), so it might be "youngest kid in my class always" syndrome, but whatevs.

Yup, I know the feeling. Had I known in college that I'd start greying at 25 I probably would have put down the Manic Panic and enjoyed my natural color while I could. Now I'm 35 and hair dye is a central aspect of my beauty routine, but rather than purple, I'm experimenting with the wonderful world of brown. It's not quite as boring as it sounds.

@curlysue I dyed all through high school too and the first time someone pointed out that I had quite a few grey hairs was a stylist at a salon, I was 24. I'm 34 now, have more grey than I even know about! I don't regret dyeing when I was young though cause I never liked the flat dark brownness of my natural color so I just look at it as enhancing a feature I never loved in the first place. What I do hate though is the different texture of the grey hairs and how they dye way lighter than the rest of my hair.

I pluck my gray hairs, but it's really not because I don't want them; it's an OCD thing. I think gray hair looks awesome and I will embrace it once I reach the point where I no longer have the urge to pluck them (that is, when I have so many that they no longer stand out).

@jen325 I do the same thing! There are still so few of them, so when I find one I'm always urged to pluck it and examine it. "Whoa! This hair! It's all white! Cool!" ...I imagine I'll feel differently about this in a few years.

I can relate-ish. I'm starting to do that whole male pattern baldness thing, which I knew was coming since every male ever in my family has gone bald, and I kind of want to just buzz the damn thing and be done with it. GF wants me to keep it because "you're tall and no one can really even see [the balding spot] unless they're standing above you." But gah! I HATE knowing that it's there, even if I can't see it.

Thoughts?

And if I do buzz it, what should I do with my beard?

Secondary thoughts: buzzed head and big ol' beard? Is that a look? Is that anything?

That last part is what kind of troubles me. When I've told other people of my intent to buzz my hair, they almost uniformly tell me, "No! They love my hair!" And I want to yell, "But it's going away! Forever! There will come a point when it looks awful! Why can't I just cut to the chase!"

But their near-universal appeals for me to cling to my hair worry me...

@Emby My husband has black hair that is both receding and graying. He keeps it cut short, rocks some little hipster-nerd sideburns, and only shaves every other day. I find it so goddamn unfair that he keeps getting hotter with every second that passes, though, really, it does work out well for me. In conclusion, embrace it. I know bald-headed boys with beards and they kill it.

@Emby Bald guys who own their baldness look infinitely better than guys who try to hide it. And yes, facial hair is in no way dependent on top-of-head-hair. With that said, just because you know where your hairline is eventually going to end doesn't mean you have to beat it to the punch. And close-cropped is also always a good idea.

@EyreHead I think close cropped is a really good look especially in that middle-y stage where it's not too far advanced or whatever? it's like easing yourself in...

i have a friend who was like "guys tell me when I need to x my hair" and then i guess he went ahead with buzzing it shorter when he felt (un?)comfortable with it, at a time when I was still like it's not a big deal! you're too worried! it looks fine!

@EyreHead Seconded! My boyfriend has repeatedly said that if he ever starts to go bald, he's shaving all of it immediately. (Which I'm fine with, he looks good bald and guys who own their bald are sexy, duh.) But he's started greying a bit on top which you can't see much because (a) he's stupidly tall and (b) he's got light hair anyway. I love the greys, he hates them and wants to shave it all off even though he has fabulously awesome thick hair. As always, boys (and girls!), do what makes you happy and makes you feel better. I'm just partial to a few greys in there is all. :)

I've got a silver streak I can showcase or hide, depending on how I part my hair. I've never considered dyeing my hair. Granted, I only started going grey around the 30-year mark. My hair thinning is a much greater cause of consternation than my greys ever were.

I started finding them this time last year, looking in the mirror at a big, stressful work meeting. My husband later poked around and found about 7 of them in total. Last week, he did the same thing, and found the same number (about 5-10) again. Man, I wonder what horrible life event could have caused me to start temporarily developing grey hairs?

@oh, disaster My mother found my first gray hair when I was 16 and we were in line at the DMV to get my driver's permit--she YELLED it out. The lady helping us at the counter tried really hard not to laugh, but couldn't hold it back. :/

I'm fine with it now, and also kind of like it. I have super-dark, curly hair, so you just end up seeing a few sparkly pieces in some curls here and there.

I have been battling gray hair since high school, and I have been having an existential crisis ever since. I want to embrace my gray, and I totally understand that feeling when you look at a picture of Emmylou Harris and she is so gray, and awesome and sang Evangeline with Robbie Robertson and it would be so great to be just like her and if I just.let.my.gray go...
Then I look in the mirror at my gray hair. It isn't smooth and shiny like Emmylou's. It is wiry, coarse, and like nothing I have seen before. It is like pubic hair.
Then I throw on the plastic gloves and pour me a big ol' bottle of Feria.

I have red hair, and when I was little, a ridiculous amount of people told me that redheads go gray really early. But I never hear that anymore. Anyone know if this is true or were a bunch of old people just trying to make a 5 year old sad?
Also, my hair tends to have multicolored strands ranging from blonde to dark red, and my mom is convinced that all my blonde hairs are actually white.

@Sarah Kenkel@facebook - i dont' know about the redheads prematurely greying, but i think my dad went when he was about 40, and yeah - his grey and my grey are similar: like a dirty blonde color? i asked my hairdresser about that, like "heeey, so can people go BLONDE when they get older?" and she looked through my hair a bit and said "nope. those are greys. sorry."

@Sarah Kenkel@facebook I am a redhead too and have never heard that. I think the more likely indicator is how other redheads in your family go gray. If you have other redheads in your family. I am literally the only one in my mine. I guess I hit a genetic jackpot?

@teenie My Dad was a redhead, although it darkened to brown by the time I he was in his mid-twenties I think. Um...I dunno if he went grey earlier than most people though. I think it was the average time.

@Sarah Kenkel@facebook My dude's dad, who was a redhead, went gray at what I believe was an average age, but he went ALL gray. Like his whole head is white(/possibly pinkish?). Maybe that's what they were thinking of.

In contrast, my mom started going gray in her teens/twenties, very early. However, her hair at 66 is a lovely stripey mix of gray and white and silver and black. Other women actually ask her where she got it dyed (it's all natural, baby!).

i've had grey hair since i was six. so it's just a thing with me. i dyed it once because my mom thought i should. that was lame. then i dyed it pink (i so appreciate the fact that i don't need to bleach anything to get pink streaks in my hair!) and that was awesome.

@cliuless !!! That's so awesome! I always wanted to go grey early because I'm very pale with blue eyes and I thought it would look cool. But alas, I stayed blonde until I started dyeing my hair very dark brown. And now having grey hair is a Fashion Thing, so you're lucky.

@MoxyCrimeFighter thanks! i embrace it. i've also had people ask me if i dyed it that way...? which is confusing to me, since there is no discernible pattern to it. if i had tried to dye it the way it comes in, i wouldn't had to do it one hair at a time. (i'm 21 and probably half my hair is grey, for reference's sake.)

@cliuless I got a few gray hairs around 16 and they haven't really multiplied since then (11 yrs later). But as the owner of a head of all-black Asian hair, I was sort of hoping I would go totally gray so I could dye my hair more interesting colors than stupid variants of black/brown/auburn.

Eh, I've been going gray since I was 18 and since my father looked like Santa by his 45th birthday it was kind of expected.

Now, having said that, I'm debating dying my hair because the color has gone from a rich, dark chocolate to some sort of ashy brown. If I could dye my brown hairs back to dark & leave the whites, I'd be fine.

Also, I discovered not only my first gray hair in my nethers, but also plucked a white one out of my eyebrows this week. When the events are taken individually they are merely interesting happy hour mentions, but combined can lead to "I'M SO OOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLD" misery spirals.

@RosemaryF thank you for being the first to mention nether-grays! There is an episode of The League where a character finds one and he's all "you're not supposed to be here yet! I'm only [mid-30's] years old!" My reaction was "wow, he made it a really long time!"

@JessicaLovejoy All my top-hair is like that because it bleaches whenever I so much as think about going outside, so I get strands that are light brown, honey, shock blonde, silvery, then shock blonde back out again. I love it and will henceforth tell people my hair color is "houndstooth."

My under-hair (you know, the part people only see when you're upside down) is a lovely burgundy.

my roots are about 1/2" now. i'm teetering. do dye or not to dye. my hair is 3/4 silver and i'm 32. i due it a nice soft chocolate brown. i started greying at 16. (finances are conspiring against me and i have to push my dye job back to 10 weeks instead of my normal 8. i want to be ready to embrace it, but i don't think i am)

@LeafySeaDragon I'm 32 too and I was, up until about a year and a half ago, in the exact same situation you're in. I bleached all of the brown dye out and let the white hair grow out with the blonde ends. My hair's so white on the top of my head that after a bit of purpley-blue toner on the blonde, you can't really tell too much of a difference between the two. Since it's been a year and a half of growing now most of the blonde is gone and my gray hair's out in force. It's kind of amazing and a total relief not to have to keep up with the ever 2.5 week root touch ups. DO EET!

@ReginalTSquirge@twitter @conniving little shit I wasn't actually asking, haha. I was under the impression that ReginalTSquirge was quoting one of the trial scenes from My Cousin Vinny Joe Pesci's character (Vinny) refers to his cousin/friend at the two "yoots" instead of youths because of his heavy Brooklyn accent. The judge from Alabama then interrupts him and says, "Excuse me, hwhat is a yoot?" since he is confused. Maybe I was wrong, and My Cousin Vinny wasn't being quoted?

Ever since that post a few weeks ago where someone referred to her grey hairs as "sparklies," I have seriously had a 180-degree shift in how I view my grey hairs. I'm 27 and don't have THAT many, but I also know my mother and grandmother went grey very early, so I don't have much hope. I was feeling really down about them, obsessively picking, etc.

But, sparklies! I am a total magpie and love all things glitter and shiny, so that really ~spoke~ to me. Glitter hair! I love it.

My hair is a crazy puffball that is simultaneously brown and red with a bit of blonde mixed in. It'll be years before I notice if there's any gray. My mother's mother went gray by first developing big red/copper streaks at her temples. I have these, too, so we shall see. If I do go gray, I'll probably just dye it redder, as I've never dyed my hair before (high school Manic Panic adventures aside) and red sounds fun.

I also started going grey at a very young age. At about 24 I decided to stop dying it. I am now 29 and the color has started to look a little ashy and dull. I really didn't want to get into dying it again. SO expensive! So time consuming! Then I went to my stylist and got balayage "hair painting" highlights. It's amazing. Looks very natural. My grey hair still shows but my hair has more dimension. Plus, you only have to do it every 4-6 months. I highly recommend it.

@mustelid I am right there with you. My mom is almost 60 (AAHHHH) and she's still only got a little dusting around the temples and top. Judging by her I'm going to be 100% brunette for the next thirty years.

I dye my hair red but go months without dying it (yay, poverty!) so I don't think I have any greys yet. I do however have one *incredible* white eyebrow hair. I plucked it once, accidentally, and was devastated but luckily it grew back. I'm a little Golum-y about it, my precious and all that. But yeah, white/grey hair is gorgeous.

At 25 I discovered Vaughn, my one white hair, as he stood straight up from my head. Three years later and we are still going strong. Sometimes I go for weeks without seeing him, but then, I look in the mirror, and I'm like "Hey, Vaughn! Is that you? Looking good as ever, my man". And he doesn't say anything, cause he is just a white hair (white, no color, not gray), but he seems to stand a little straighter when I notice him. Which is good, since he is kind of short, much shorter than the other hairs, so his confidence does him credit.

I've had one pure white hair on the top toward the back since I was about 16. And it's a weird hair, like it's not part of my hair, but it is? It's thicker and a lot coarser than the rest of my hair. I'm 19 now and it still hasn't gone anywhere and I haven't gotten any more. My hair is red though. I've heard that a lot of redheads don't really go gray, they go directly to white, and I've also heard that they go grayer/whiter faster than people with other hair colours? I don't know.

I think anyone with gray hair should love it and embrace it. I know I'm still young and I may change my mind later when my colour starts going, but I think gray hair can look really cool. I especially like hair that has a bit of gray all around. It makes the hair look like it has dimension to it!

@kpo987 I think "gray hair" is just the name for it because when people with dark hair start getting white hairs mixed in, it looks like their hair is going gray (like if you were to paint small yellow lines next to small red lines and stand far away from them, it would look orange).

Hmm, my mom has red hair, and she started graying really young, too (but so am I, and I have really dark brown hair). Maybe red heads are just more genetically predisposed to graying sooner? Like how red heads apparently have a lower pain tolerance/feel more pain?

@kpo987 Gray hair, based on my personal experience, has a totally different texture from normal hair. It is usually thicker/coarser. I sort of think sometimes (this is a little gross) that they're like pubic hairs that grew on your head and got really long and that you brush out? My Dude has a ton of gray and the texture of his hair is a lot rougher now than it used to be.

@kpo987
My mom had red hair, and she started greying with a dashing stripe, a la Bonnie Raitt. I used to have a glorious copper-colored beard but it went totally white way before the hair on top, which is taking the long way into grayness.

I started dyeing my hair when I was 15, so I actually have no idea when I started to go gray. I only noticed that apparently about 1/3 of my hair is now silver when I had my daughter and was too busy/poor to have it dyed for nearly a year. I recently decided to run with the gray and when it's all gray/white, dye it some primary, Manic Panic color. I am secretly hoping this lines up perfectly with whenever such a move will embarrass my daughter the most. Mwa ha ha.

My boyfriend also was the catalyst for me, 'cause before it was just kinda an OCD thing to find and destroy them, but now it's a badge of rebellious anti-beauty-culture, I guess? Also: they're shiny silver. Cool stuff.

Though now I know my mum was lying when she said having me in her early 20s was what caused her to go grey.

There is no way I'm dyeing my hair if it goes grey. Not because I'll prefer it, but because I am the worst at maintaining any sort of beauty regimen that is more involved than showering regularly. So then I would look like the crazy mom in "Henry Fool," with like 3 inches of grey roots.

I'm another one who started getting gray hair in her early 20s. My only real disappointment with that was that it was coming in all over instead of in a cool stripe like a friend's girlfriend. I'm bad at keeping up with dying my hair and there's a part of that feels like the gray should bother me now that I'm older... But I'm also short and youthful-looking and having gray hair has been pretty helpful in convincing people I don't have a fake ID.

I first saw grays when I was sixteen... and dyed my hair until now (24). My grays are all salt-and-peppered in with my natural hair, and there's a lot of them. My boyfriend was the one who wanted me to grow out my natural hair...

I got my first gray hair when I was in 8th grade! Now at 27 I've got a few definite streaks. I used to dye it, but I got lazy and let it grow in, and then people started complimenting me on it and asking me how I dyed my hair like that. So I think I'm going to keep it for now.

I love my mom's gray hair, but her hair is brown and mine is red. So, I really want to leave mine when it turns gray (also I hate hair dye so much that I'll probably never want to dye it regularly) but I'm not sure how a mix of red and gray will look.

My boyfriend has some gray at his temples and all it does is give him Obama-esque gravitas...

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